Did you ever walk into your CrossFit Box and see the whiteboard with the workout on it just to find that one exercise that makes you get an instant “eww”factor? For me that one is a Thruster. I have a Love/Hate relationship with them. On one hand they are great for building strength and power and they just challenge you mentally and physically.
So if you don’t know what a Thruster is, here is the definition: The Thruster is a powerful movement that moves a weight through a large range of motion. This movement simply combines a front squat with a push press. This exercise deserves to be among exercise royalty for its amazing ability to cover so many different aspects of fitness such as flexibility, stability, strength, endurance. This is why I feel training what you don’t “LOVE” to do is imperative for building that strong functional foundation for other aspects of fitness.
Thrusters offer an opportunity to use a wide scope of variations to help us gain these sought-after abilities such as explosive power in the hip drive and strength in the shoulders. So why do so many people avoid doing Thrusters when they see them on the board ? THEY ARE HARD! Yes they are hard and require a lot of taxing strength on the muscular system. It takes a lot of effort, coordination, and stamina to perform a lot of them in a row and they are a mental game for most of us. To be efficient you need to practice.
Below are some tips to practice this skill :
- Drive through your heels – as soon as you come onto your toes, you have nothing to push off against and instantly lose power.
- Use your hips and legs to help generate power to get the bar overhead.
- Have active shoulders at the top of the lift and don’t leave the bar in front of you when it’s overhead; pull it back over your heels.
The thruster has some major benefits. The thruster is a serious compound (utilizes more than one joint) exercise that combines a clean, front squat and push-press. Because the exercise comprises multiple movements into one, you get multiple benefits. The thruster works all of the major muscles in your legs (glutes, hamstrings and quads) during the squat portion of the movement. The power that you generate from your legs when you drive out of the squat is transferred to your upper body through your abdominals and lower back before finally reaching your shoulders, upper back and triceps to help propel the bar over your head.
With all that movement its a total body exercise just like our other favorite movement, the Burpee. Dare I say they suck too ( however if you know me, I LOVE them). The thruster increases your heart rate and oxygen capacity making your cardiovascular system stronger and more effective in other WOD’s. You can add variety by changing the weight and speed of the thruster movement. By adding weight to make the thruster heavier, you will develop muscular strength and power. Making your thruster lighter will be more taxing on your muscular endurance and aerobic capacity. To add EVEN more variety and strength to this movement, you can also implement a sandbag, kettlbells or dumbbells to change and challenge your body!
If you are doing a workout with thrusters in them, keep in mind the following:
-Use your hips and legs while driving through your heels
-Make sure you keep the movement fluid by stringing the front squat into the press without pausing
-Keep those elbows UP and keep a loose grip
-Breathe in a steady rhythm
-Rest BEFORE your gassed out
By practicing what you don’t enjoy, it will make you a stronger more powerful athlete overall! You need to work on the components that you are weak at to become a more well rounded athlete ! With that being said, embrace the whiteboard when it says your doing thrusters and pray that the next component isn’t burpees!
References:
http://www.crossfitrockwall.com/crossfit_rockwall/thruster.html
http://breakingmuscle.com/strength-conditioning/how-to-vary-your-routine-and-get-better-at-thrusters
http://boxlifemagazine.com/training/whats-in-a-thruster-plus-a-few-tips-to-do-them-more-efficiently